For most folks, I would imagine, their first glimpse of the Marlins' new stadium is quite underwhelming. Certainly that was my experience this weekend in Miami. The stadium is seen here viewed from I-95. It's not actually all that near the downtown (though a lot closer than where the Marlins used to play) and it's not in a great area. Hopefully the stadium itself will be the catalyst to change this. I'm very curious to see how this plays out--hopefully it won't be a $1 billion disaster.

Every season there are pitchers who pull double duty; they makes some starts, but also pitch in relief . Sometimes this includes rehabbing starters. Other times it includes relievers who need to make emergency starts. Often its the team's extra starter, who relieves when his starting abilities are not needed. Every season this leads to an interesting combo, pitchers who start 10 games and also finish 10 in relief. Almost every season until now.

2011 was the first season since 1904, in which no pitcher both started 10 games and finished 10 in relief. The complete list since 1901 can be found in this link. Here are the most recent years.

Baseball history is filled with great young center fielders. For some reason, they seem to capture the excitement of the fans more than any other position players. Think of a great young center fielder from baseball's past--chances are good that you thought of Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Kirby Puckett, or Ken Griffey Jr.

This past season, two more young center fielders put up great seasons.

One of the most basic criticism of ERA as a tool for measuring pitchers is the way it handles runners left on base when the pitcher leaves the game. Two pitchers can throw identical games and walk away with extremely disparate statistics because of how their bullpens fared after their departure. It seems unfair to penalize a pitcher for runs allowed that were only partly his fault.

One way of examining this disparity is by looking at the number of runs given to a pitcher after he has left the game and adjusting it to show how many runs he should have given up. The Baseball-Reference.com Starting Pitching Page has a record for each starter's bequeathed runners as well as how many of those runners scored. Overall in 2011, starters left the game with 3186 runners on base and 1046 of those ended up scoring. In other words, on average, 33% of the runners left on base when a starter left a game ended up scoring.

I just saw some footage of Carl Yastrzemski batting, and boy he really choked down on the bat, huh? Some of you older folks who saw him play must know, but the three things I noticed were:

A) He held the bat way, way down low, with his lower hand well past the knob.
B) The bat looked incredibly long, although the length may have been accentuated by how low he held it
C) His swing seemed remarkably unlevel for such a successful hitter.

Click through for some baseball card images I grabbed confirming how low he held the bat.

A while back, over at the old blog, I took a look at the players who hit the most home runs without hitting more than one in a game. The last two and a half years have seen considerable advances in the PI, and the expanded PI database, the ability to run PI streak finder results through the batting season finder, and the home run logs, now allow us to create complete leader boards for this topic. If you are interested in recreating the results, the basic methodology is explained in post referenced above.

Justin Verlander won the AL Cy Young and MVP awards, but one could argue that Jered Weaver had a better year. Now, don't get me wrong--if I had an MVP vote or Cy Young vote, both would have gone to Verlander. What follows is a sort of devil's advocate argument in favor of Weaver.

As of this writing, there are 295 people enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, with that number sure to grow in the next couple of months with voting season once again upon us. Of the honorees in Cooperstown, 109 were inducted by the Baseball Writers Association of America. Two others, Lou Gehrig and Roberto Clemente got into the Hall of Fame through special elections. Everyone else was put in Cooperstown through some kind of committee.

Dating back to the first vote for the Hall of Fame in 1936, committees have wielded enormous influence in selections, from a Centennial Committee in 1937 that got legendary A's manager Connie Mack his plaque to a special meeting of the Negro League Committee that enshrined 17 black baseball greats in 2006. And that says nothing of all the men inducted over the years by the Veterans Committee, by far the most active of the groups save for the writers since its founding in 1953. All this being said, a few more commitees might be in order.

It appears he is the first major-league player to die in the Netherlands, as Baseball-Reference.com doesn't show any players who died there. That makes sense looking at the above list, since most of those players are still alive and those who played in the 1800s likely immigrated to the United States and ultimately died here.

Long before the introduction of all the advanced metrics available on Baseball-Reference.com, Sean posted all sorts of splits, and I fell in love with them immediately. I think there is no better basic analysis that reveals so much beyond basic stat lines.

I'm working up a few posts showing just how cool splits can be, even with just a cursory examination.

It is difficult to evaluate relievers with isolated classic statistics, but even so it is interesting to note that several relievers made all-time top ten lists in 2011. Obviously the modern usage on bullpens and the situations faced by the pitchers effect the meaning of these numbers, but I'll leave it up to you do decide the value of these stats, if any.

Pete Abraham reports that the Red Sox are talking to Bobby Valentine about their managerial job and that Bobby V is interested.

Now, those of you who have been reading my stuff for a while know that I make a lot of predictions, and sometimes those predictions are wrong. (You get 50 bonus point if the phrase "Phillies are done" just went through your head.)

But check out the following excerpts from chat sessions I had with Neil Paine:

I took down the ads because they were driving me crazy. We'll be relying on merchandise sales to try to break even. If you want to help ensure that this blog continues, check out the High Heat Store link on the right sidebar.

Joking aside, I think Red Sox management did a great job of poisoning Francona's chances for managing in 2012. I can't imagine any team hiring him after the leaked allegations about marriage problems and pain medication abuse. He'll be back, though, after a year or two as a bench coach.

I compared batters' 2011 BAbip (batting average on balls in play) to their established norms, which I defined as their combined BAbip for 2008-10. I set the minimums at 200 PAs for 2011 and 1,100 PAs* for 2008-10. There were 176 players in the study. I've included regular BA data as a frame of reference.

I'm guessing that sometime today, Dale Sveum is going to be named the new manager of the Red Sox. But let's turn back the clock to the playing portion of Sveum's career. (For those who do not know, his last name is pronounced "Swaim".)

Sveum was a 3rd baseman and shortshop with the Brewers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then bounced around with a bunch of other teams through the rest of the 90s. He posted a career OPS+ of 82 with a .236 batting average, and thus wasn't particularly well know for his offensive abilities. Interestingly, though, he did post a 25 HR, 95 RBI season in 1987, but since that was a crazy homer-happy year, that was good for just a 95 OPS+. Before the steroids era, this was quite uncommon.

Sveum is the subject of my all-time favorite baseball quote. The only place I have ever seen it referenced was in the sports section of the Philadelphia Enquirer on August 20, 1992, in an article by Frank Fitzpatrick. This was about 10 days after the Phillies had traded Sveum to the White Sox, in the dog days of yet another losing season for the Phillies. (Little did anyone know they'd make the World Series the following year.)

Anyway, the quote, directly from Fitzpatrick's piece is:

Someone in center field brought a banner that read: "Bring Back Sveum." Last week, Dale Sveum, now with the White Sox, said he missed Philadelphia like a hole in the head. That prompted Phils general manager Lee Thomas to say: "Did he say anything about the hole in his bat?"

Oh, SNAP! Isn't that the best comeback you've ever heard? Lee Thomas was never afraid to speak his mind, but that was an unusually harsh statement.

Sveum has made more news in his career over bad issues than good one, his bitter departure from Philly a good case in point. Most famously, he broke his leg in a collision with teammate Darryl Hamilton (which was not Sveum's fault.) More recently, Sveum was let go as third-base coach of the Red Sox after getting more than his fair share of runners thrown out at home. (Of course, they did win a World Series in 2004 with him in that job...)

Anyway, let's talk about this baseball card. Bowman used to be its own company, but by 1992 it was owned by Topps and this was simply a subsidiary set issued by the card giant. The front features an odd photo, with the sun in Sveum's eyes and him engaging in that age-old baseball warm-up exercise: palm scratching.

The back features what looks like the media guide photo, which is as good as any, but would work better if the front were an action shot. The overall color scheme on the card back is simply atrocious: too many colors and patterns, and the large "B" in the middle is very distracting.

The stats on the back are splits by team, which is a pretty cool concept. It's of course not terribly meaningful, as most of the splits are tiny samples, but nevertheless it was interesting to see out-of-the-box thinking, and I do think this sort of card back helped usher in more broader attention to more interesting stats.